Yeah the ripping quality is really determined by the drive. I used EAC for ages but switched to dBpowerAMP a few years ago and think it is great value for money.

I have almost 800 GB of FLAC files ripped from CDs. I find dBpowerAMP much easier to configure. Plus it has some great plug ins like HDCD that automatically detects if your CD is HDCD and thus turns it into a 24 bit file. I'm sure you could set up EAC to do the same, but dBPowerAMP just makes it easier to configure. It also has built in codecs like FLAC and LAME MP3 and works great on multi core systems, i.e. it will keep ripping and encode in the background using other cores. This works great on my i7 laptop.

I'm not trying to hijack the thread but I have a question about the optical disc drives. Your operating system and software was likely loaded from an optical drive. Bit errors in .EXE files can render the file useless but this rarely happens. Why does that same drive have errors in audio but none in data?

I'm not trying to hijack the thread but I have a question about the optical disc drives. Your operating system and software was likely loaded from an optical drive. Bit errors in .EXE files can render the file useless but this rarely happens. Why does that same drive have errors in audio but none in data?

The reason that audio CDs hold so much more data then do data CDs is that there is a lot more redundancy built into data disks. Thus its much less likely that data will be corrupted on a data disk.

That said, baring significant damage, its pretty rare to see any corruption in audio CDs either.